In many areas of surgery, there is a need for anatomical guidance and rapid pathology to be provided during a diagnostic or therapeutic procedure. In the area of surgical oncology, for example, there is a need to determine if a tumor has been completely resected, such as by verifying that the margin of resected tumor tissue is clear, without having to wait for pathology to process the resected tissue to verify that there are no remaining signs of cancerous growth in the margin.
Similarly, medical and biomedical practices often involve the visualization of human or other biological tissues as a means of detecting pathology, including the detection of cancer or pre-cancerous lesions. Such practices may include, but are not limited to, physical examination, endoscopic examinations or treatments, or procedures employing other imaging technologies, such as radiography, fluoroscopy, tomography, computerized tomography, magnetic resonance studies, positron emission tomography, or nuclear medical scans. Such imaging systems may detect abnormalities suggestive of pathology like cancer, but lack a real-time, definitive capacity to actually diagnose the presence (or absence) of such pathology in real-time in the tissues examined. Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need still exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.